Cabarete and Sosúa are coming next …

August 14th, 2006

We are now in the process of starting the creation of the DRListings.com Network. The two first web site that are in the oven are www.cabarete-real-estate.com and www.sosua-real-estate.com. They can be found in those two temporary URL: http://www.drlistings.com/cabarete-re/ and http://www.drlistings.com/sosua-re/ respectively for those who would like to follow their evolution until their official release.
Stay tuned! ;-)

Real Estate Web site template.

August 13th, 2006

So finally we have made it! Yes everything is set up now for us to create some real estate web site with cross advertising on DRListings.com. The idea was simple but we had to work on it. There is some sample so you can look at it. There is the VIP Caribbean Property web site that we just created for one of our client that was interested by this brilliant idea. We are planning on using this same system for our other domain name like www.sosua-real-estate.com and www.cabarete-real-estate.com. Stay tuned.

[added]
We have added a special section on our Real Estate web site for those who would be interested in having a Real Estate web site based on the Dominican Real Estate web site template that we can deliver. Just follow the preceding link to find more info about this new offer.

Tricks or treats!

August 8th, 2006

Today I’m going to talk to about something very weird that is happening here. :)

So, here it is. If you are a Realtor in Dominican Republic you are facing a strong competition because it’s almost impossible to get any exclusivity agreement with the property owner. The properties ends up being for sale by more than 3 or 4 different real estate agent company at the same time. But, there is something even worst than that. And that thing is a consequence of that popular habit. Since there can be more than one Realtor trying to sale a property, then some other can fake being interested in buying or renting a house advertised by another realty company to get some informations about it without having to travel and get the informations on their own.

Being aware about that, we are going to implement a special feature on our property listing web site (DRListings.com) so that the IP number of any person making an inquiry will be stored for review if needed. Wew wew wew I see some people saying “Hey it against the personal privacy!”. Not really, the only thing that an IP number can tell is that a person was “seen” by our server as coming from a given IP number so in no way we will be able to track, hack or gater any other informations from that peson. If you have any argument against that feature, just comment on this post and try to convince me not to do it! ;)

RobotStats: the Crawlers Tracker - Tracking Spiders Script

August 7th, 2006

Have you ever wanted to know when and on which pages the search engine robots were crawling your web site? Ok, I see the old techy smiling :). Yes you can always dig down your log files, use some third party statistic web site. But why not doing it on your own? Try the following web application. We just installed it on DRListings.com. So, we now have a tool to figure out how the search engines are crawling our web site and how often they will crawl the same pages and some new pages. We hope it will help us optimize our web site to better serve our clients.
RobotStats: the Crawlers Tracker - Tracking Spiders Script

Our WebMaster’s Ressources

August 6th, 2006

This page is a none exhaustive list of the tools that our web masters utilize on a daily basis.

Web Browser

  • Internet Explorer 6.0 Can’t develop any web site without being sure it will show up correctly under it! :|
  • Firefox The easiest to develop for! :D
  • Opera In between ;)
  • Konqueror - Almost as good as Firefox. That’s the KDE desktop’s default browser under Linux.
  • SeaMonkey - Was called the mozilla suite before. As good as Firefox because it utilize the same HTML engine.

Online tools

  • Google Analytics - You need to create a Google account to be able to utilize that ressource. It give a better overview of how and from where people are finding our web site.
  • Google Site Map - The same as above with this other usefull tool.
  • Google Alerts - This tool is usefull to follow what is added to the Google’s index.
  • Google Maps - This tool could be usefull to locate a property available on DRListings.com but since there is not much info about the Dominican Republic in that tool, we are still waiting before actually implementing a service based on this tool in our web site.
  • Alexa Page Rank -Some people like to think that it is still a usefull ressource to help web master figure out the popularity of their web site. I found it usefull just to check how far from reality they are! :D It is base on the browsing experience of the people that utilize the Alexa Toolbar, so!
  • SEO book Where you will find some very well design tools to check your ranking and optimize a web site. We may use some their tools here on DRListings.net with some little adaptation in a near future.
  • IP to Location on the SEOMOZ.org web site.
  • A large variety of SEO tools on the SEOChat web site

Web editor Softwares

  • DreamWeaver - A powerfull wbe site editor. Our designer use it with Firework to prepare the layout of the new web site and to maintain other web site.
  • HTML-kit - My prefered flat text HTML editor. I like to keep FULL control over the HTML tags.
  • Fireworks - A powerfull graphic software for the layout designer and to prepare the litle graphics tha will spice up a web site.
  • TopStyle - In its Lite form it already a powerfull Cascading style sheet editor. The pro version incorporate the features of the Lite version but is more oriented toward a full HTML editor.
  • WinAmp - Everybody has the right to work in a pleasent environement. :-)
  • Nvu - A XHTML compliant WISIWYG editor. Very usefull to create a draft XHTML file with styles. Its development is apparently on the hold for some reason. Maybe to move forward on new technologies.

Operating system

  • Windows XP - Every body knows it! I think :-)
  • Linux Slackware - Linux version that we have installed on our Linux machine.
  • FreeBSD - The OS available on our production hosting server.

Caribbean Toolkit

August 6th, 2006

I just found an interesting web site. It is called The Caribbean Toolkit If you are planning to start a business you may find that ressource more than usefull. It’s sponsored by the World Bank. You will find some tools. It is worth to check. Don’t miss it!

DRListings’ and En Paradise ressources

August 6th, 2006

This the page page that list all the diffent sections and web site that we are using for the development of our different web sites and client’s web sites. So here it is in an organized way (I hope! :-)).

The drlistings.com ressources.

DRListings on Paul’s Computer

DRListings.com Alpha version.
This is the place where almost everything get in place just before the beta test. So the work there is normally the alfa version and sometimes it is in complete synch with the propduction server. There may be some other general interest on his server so here is his root address.

The Monkey

DRListings.com Beta version.
This is the place where everything is tested in real life environment. Actually it is served from the same DRListings.com server. That’s the web site where we are showing the monkey what we want him to show to the rest of the world! :-)

The production sevrer

DRListings.com Production version.
This the Dominican Republic Real Estate MLS web site.

Support forum

DRListings.com’s Support forum.
This is the place for web serfers and agents are given a chance to speak freely with each other. Even though is it not utilized much, we are planning on elevate it’s popularity.

Advertisement server

En Paradise Advertisement server
This is our advertisement server. This is the server that serves all the “Ads by Enparadise” on the DRListings.com web site.

Intranet

Intranet Server
This is the place where our teem meet together. We are handling all our contacts and projects on this server. It is a restricted area! I mean that it is password protected. So only our team can access this web site.

About

March 14th, 2006

Welcome to DRListings’s News.
We have decided to create this new web site so that we could talk and express our thought with the rest of the world without the constraint of our other commercial web sites http://www.drlistings.com/ The Dominican Reapublic Real Estate MLS web site and http://www.enparadise.com/ The Web and Graphics Design web site. It is also a place for us to meet and to find all our ressources and past news and ideas. It is meant to be like a mnemonic web site for us to refer to. Everybody is welcome to contribute his thought or ideas as this is not a constraint web site. So, feal free to contribute your thought this web site is for you also.

Hello world!

March 14th, 2006

Welcome to DRListings’s News.
We have decided to create this new web site so that we could talk and express our thaught with the rest of the world without the constraint of our other commercial web sites http://www.drlistings.com/ The Dominican Reapublic Real Estate MLS web site and http://www.enparadise.com/ The Web and Graphics Design web site.